


Crashing at a friend's

by alittlelesspain



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-31 01:24:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12665421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittlelesspain/pseuds/alittlelesspain
Summary: “Yeah, I have a friend who’s letting me crash on her couch.” Maggie had said, as she left Alex, on the night of their breakup.The friend is really a seedy third-rate hotel downtown, and the couch is really a ratty old bed whose better days had seen better days, but Maggie feels all the more comforted by this abrupt removal from the normality of her life.(Angsty, with a happy ending. A bit of a response fic to 3x05.)





	Crashing at a friend's

**Author's Note:**

> This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever written. I don’t give a single fuck. If the CW’s plots don’t have to make sense, neither do mine.
> 
> Warning for Maggie drinking more alcohol than usual, in the aftermath of the breakup.
> 
>  **ETA:** I hadn't realized when I wrote this, or I'd have given the credit earlier, but the original "Alex is a White Martian" conspiracy theory was proposed by [zennie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zennie).

“Yeah, I have a friend who’s letting me crash on her couch.” Maggie had said, as she left Alex, on the night of their breakup.

The friend is really a seedy third-rate hotel downtown, and the couch is really a ratty old bed whose better days had seen better days, but Maggie feels all the more comforted by this abrupt removal from the normality of her life. Even if she had her old apartment to go back to, it would only have reminded her of everything lacking there, that her joint one with Alex had.

The hotel isn’t the kind with room service, but the bar is stocked with whisky of passable enough quality that Maggie doesn’t want to immediately retch it back out. When she gets hungry, a bit of listless searching online reminds her that National City’s population is concentrated with enough hipsters now to garner its own online anything-goes food delivery service. Maggie has always categorized such sites into that particular type of ivory tower white bread-ness that she can’t stand, but the guy who delivers three of the oiliest takeout containers in National City, and then takes off with no questions asked, kind of makes her reconsider her stance on them.

On the first night of her stay at the hotel, by the time she’s on her second glass, it occurs to Maggie that this is about the point that M’gann would cut her off, back at the bar. Maggie had rarely let it go beyond one glass, but some cases were tough, and that’s when having her bartender also be her friend had really _sucked_ , because Maggie had just wanted to forget.

M’gann is on Mars, though, with bigger things to worry about than whether Maggie is chasing mediocre whisky down with the worst kind of junk food. Nothing like a shock to her system, to wash out the fact that the _one_ thing in her life that had gone right, had blown up before Maggie had even realized it was going south.

She rinses and repeats the procedure over her first four days at the hotel. There are a couple of texts from James, as well as a few calls from her captain, probably tipped off by the fact that Maggie had voluntarily put in for a week’s vacation for the first time in _years_. Maggie lets the calls go to voicemail and the texts unanswered, taking a sip every time the phone vibrates.

On the fifth day, the door to her hotel room explodes.

\---

 

Well, to the door’s credit, Maggie has a bit of warning.

“Maggie? Maggie!”

The call of her name, from outside the room, starts out in a normal tone, but grows louder and more insistent with each repetition.

By the third repetition, Maggie straightens up and studies the bottom of her glass - the first of the day - wondering if she’s hearing things. Her senses have felt numbed all week. She would blame it on the alcohol, but she doesn’t think one glass would be responsible for her being able to hear Alex’s voice outside that door, not after the finality in her tone when she had asked Maggie to leave her apartment.

“Maggie, if you don’t answer, I’m coming in!”

“Alex, you can’t just shoot the lock in.” a second familiar voice joins the fray.

Maggie squeezes her eyes tight. Her brain is really fizzling out on the wish-fulfillment factor of this fantasy, if that’s Kara’s voice she’s hearing, of all people’s.

“Like hell I can’t.” the growled reply comes back. Alex again.

“Oh, _Rao_.” snaps Kara’s voice. “Here, let me.”

The door explodes inwards in a punch of calculated Kryptonian prowess. Maggie doesn’t bother to duck, but the shrapnel doesn’t fly far enough to reach her, and even the most adventurous shards are blocked by the ratty headboard of the bed, against which Maggie’s suitcase is propped.

She should be wide-eyed with shock, or pulling out her gun, but Maggie just stares listlessly at the two women who walk in through the splinter of a doorway.

“Sorry.” Kara says, breaking the silence. Looking around, she addresses an afterthought to no one in particular. “Breaking and entering is still bad. Don’t do it, y’all.”

She disappears immediately following the end of that, leaving Maggie alone with Alex, who’s looking at her with haunted eyes, her cheeks looking more hollowed and gaunt than usual.

Before Maggie can really say anything, Alex spots Maggie’s suitcase by the side of the bed - still unopened, contents untouched - and a choked sound leaves her mouth. Maggie doesn’t understand why that sound suddenly makes her own tears resurge. She can count the number of times she’d cried last year on one hand, with fingers left to spare. The days since the breakup, though, have practically been a flood.

Before she even registers Alex moving, the distance between them has been crossed. Alex kneels down to face Maggie’s seated form, pressing forward into the space between her legs, and resting her face against Maggie’s stomach, inhaling deeply.

“You haven’t even changed out of your clothes, have you?” Alex is mumbling into her shirt. Maggie thinks her shirt might be a little darker around the area that Alex’s face is pressed against, wetter, but it’s hard to make it out when her own vision is so blurry. “Have you been like this your whole stay here? Did I ... the White Martian... even bother to drive you, to make sure you arrived safe?”

“I thought you wanted a clean break.” Maggie says, her voice as foggy as her brain. She wonders if she’s ingested enough alcohol for her brain to conjure up this fever dream, except that Alex’s hands are digging almost painfully into her thighs, the grasp a tad too tight for comfort, as if Alex too is having trouble registering the reality of this. “Didn’t want to make you feel guilty by telling you I didn’t really have anywhere to crash.”

Alex just presses her face deeper against Maggie’s stomach.

“I came home after J’onn took care of that imposter, and woke me up.” she murmurs, the movement of her lips tangible through Maggie’s thin shirt, wet whispers against skin. “You were _gone_ , Maggie. The bonsais were still on those shelves we put up after Easter, and that gross agave nectar you like was still in the fridge, but you were _gone_.”

“Kara must have filled you in.” Maggie says. She remembers how distant Alex had been acting lately, her touches rushed and listless. Maggie had filed it away as pre-occupation with work, had tried not to become the demanding girlfriend. She wonders now, with this apparition - surely an apparition, some drunken dream of hers, come to offer her the type of closure that reality never could - whether that surmise had not been true.

Alex just shakes her head.

“She just said we broke up.” she says, words still muffled. “ _Why?”_

Maggie breaks. She’d controlled herself during the breakup, because she didn’t want that to be how Alex’s first experience ended, didn’t want to be the nightmare that Alex measured every successor against. Now, though, her voice comes out cracked and raw.

“You didn’t give me a chance, Alex! We never had a real talk about it!”

“I know!” Alex is murmuring into her skin. “I could feel the White Martian, just barely. Taking my memories and feelings, distorting them, creating some warped version of reality out of them.”

“I wish you’d talked to me more.” Maggie says, just barely taking in the words spoken. It’s a little hard to focus on concepts, with her brain swimming like this. “I just... Alex, in my previous relationships, there was never the kind of stability and safety where kids would even be a possibility. That’s what I was basing my feelings on the whole issue on.”

“Kids?” Alex mumbles, as if she’d suddenly put it together. “That’s what we broke up over? I wanted kids?”

Maggie stills.

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Alex says, finally looking up at her. “Yes? Maybe? Kind of? If the right person comes along?”

“I think you were the only right person for me.” Maggie admits. Even Kate hadn’t offered her the kind of stability that would have allowed Maggie to justify bringing a vulnerable child into the dangerous world she inhabited.

It should be odd, then, that a woman who routinely jumps into the worst kind of dangers a human could face, is the first one who has made her seriously believe in the possibility. Maggie doesn’t find it odd, though. After all, Alex has already made her believe in one impossibility: that she was worthy of being loved.

Alex is just staring at her, as if memorizing her face.

“What?” Maggie asks.

Alex shakes her head, before stalking away to grab Maggie’s unopened suitcase with covetous hands, as if refusing to let the contents - all the tangible things of Maggie’s life - slip from her gasp again.

“You’re coming home, and then we can talk _properly_ about this, and whether either of us are even ready.” she says firmly, bringing Maggie up to her feet, before running a disparaging eye over the half-empty whisky bottle on the floor. “And here’s my first reason why you should do that.”

She waves the bottle in front of Maggie, the liquid sloshing inside it catching the light, in exactly the same way that Alex’s warm brown eyes do.

“I have _way_ better alcohol at home.”

Maggie laughs. It comes out all scratchy and foreign, like she hasn’t done it in ages. God, it _feels_ like ages. She feels like she’d lived a hundred years in the past four and a half days.

“That’s always a plus.” she says, rising up, hiccuping a little in the middle of the sentence. In her unsteadiness, the hiccup makes her stagger, and Alex catches her with her free hand, bringing their bodies up close.

“Home.” Maggie confirms, aware of her words slurring in her drunkenness and exhaustion, as she leans more heavily into Alex. “Yep. Let’s go.”

“Not so fast, sleepy.” Alex says, clutching her tighter to make up for the added weight. “We still have to catch our ride.”

“Alex.” Maggie nearly whispers, and then louder. “ _Alex_ , I took a cab here, and this can’t all fit on your bike.”

But Alex kisses her quiet on her forehead, breathing deep again, lingering against her skin, and then pulls away to guide her out towards the balcony. Maggie blinks at the long-forgotten sunlight, but it is soon shadowed by vivid reds and blues.

Kara descends on them, beaming.

“Somebody called for a ride?”

\---

**Author's Note:**

> I know someone’s gonna point this out, so lemme say it first: Not wanting to have kids is valid. Wanting to have kids is valid. Breaking up over an incompatibility over such wants is valid.
> 
> But...me writing this, a piece in which people’s wants and needs adjust depending on who they’re with? Yeah, I’m allowed to do that, especially when I feel that canon didn’t really give any strong justification for Alex and Maggie’s canonical points of view on the issue, other than that one actress was leaving and they wanted to find the easiest method of writing her out. So peace out.
> 
>  **ETA:** I hadn't realized when I wrote this, or I'd have given the credit earlier, but the original "Alex is a White Martian" conspiracy theory was proposed by [zennie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/zennie).


End file.
